Market research is a 90 billion dollars Industry that helps brands work out how best to present themselves to potential customers. But these market insights are neither low-cost nor quick. Cashew research wants to vary that using AI.
Calgary, Alberta-based Cashew uses AI to develop market research plans and surveys for brands based on the knowledge they're searching for, comparable to how much brand awareness they’ve amongst a specific demographic or how a marketing slogan resonates with customers. Cashew then sends the survey to real people and uses AI to summarize and process the outcomes.
Cashew was one in every of the 200 startups chosen for TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield competition in 2025 and won the Enterprise Stage pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt.
“You could use an LLM to do in-depth research and get answers to your questions, or you would hire an organization, which will likely be very expensive,” Cashew co-founder and CEO Addy Graves told TechCrunch when describing the present market research industry. “Now there's Cashew in the center. It creates custom, fresh data to reply your query, fairly than you simply using an LLM that surfaces the identical recycled pool of knowledge that everybody finds on the web.”
Graves has greater than a decade of experience in market research. The original idea for Cashew got here from an issue she regularly faced: clients wanting complete research projects – with real human data – accomplished in a matter of days.
Shortening this time-frame while maintaining the standard of the research results has not been possible for years, Graves said, since the technology to hurry up the method will not be yet ready.
“That was definitely the aha moment,” Graves said. “And it wasn’t until the appearance of AI that we were actually in a position to automate these processes that we use as researchers, best practices, these data science-informed methodologies, and report formatting that we all know everyone wants.”
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Automating the method also reduces costs, making Cashew an option for small and medium-sized brands that couldn't have afforded to work with a standard market research firm, Graves added.
Graves founded Cashew in 2023 alongside Chief Operating Officer Rose Wong, with an initial deal with consumer packaged goods, particularly food and beverages.
Graves said she thinks Cashew can stand out within the increasingly crowded category of AI marketing tools since it isn't fully automated. Each Cashew customer receives latest human data with each project, which requires market research expertise, Graves said.
Cashew's competitive advantage may only grow as the corporate matures. The company takes all the true data it collects from its customers' projects, anonymizes it, and stores it in a database, which can even help add additional proprietary data in future research projects.
The company has raised $1.5 million Canadian in pre-seed funding and is preparing to launch its seed round in early 2026, hoping to boost as much as $5 million, Graves said. This capital is invested within the further development of product technology.
Graves said the corporate's two essential areas of focus next yr will likely be strengthening the corporate's presence within the U.S. and dealing to construct its B2B business.
“The people who find themselves already buying research, that's already an enormous category, but that doesn't even include all of the individuals who could buy research but just can't afford it or can't do it immediately because they don't have the time-frame,” Graves said. “We’re actually creating this latest category for marketers to get access to answers to those questions that that they had.”
